The DVD contains 203,000 articles and thousands of images. It includes software for browsing the content with a fast full text search and features for annotations, bookmarks and so on. The DVD is shipped with software for running on Windows, MacOS and Linux; although the latter is still new and under heavy development.

The DVD was the best-selling software product at Amazon Germany the day after it was announced. Two days later, the 10,000 copies made for the release had sold out and a new set were ordered from the factory. These will be delivered within the next few weeks.

The DVD also contains data packages for Tomeraider and Mobipocket, allowing it to be installed on PDAs, as well as a "bonus CD-ROM." This CD is a bootable LAMPPIX-CD containing an Apache server, a MySQL database and Mediawiki. This runs a Mediawiki installation directly from the CD-ROM, which you can boot from in order to have access to over 200,000 articles from your web browser.

The DVD's ISBN is 3-89853-020-5; it can be ordered for 9.90 Euros from every book shop in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For each DVD sold, one euro is donated to Wikimedia Deutschland. Both the DVD and the CD-ROM are available for free as ISO images, via P2P networks and on several FTP servers, encouraging sharing and broader distribution.

An increasing part of the Board's activity is related to public relations. Jimmy Wales is travelling or offline more frequently, due to invitations to talks all over the world. A quick view of his schedule is probably the best summary of this. Other presentations have taken Angela and Anthere offline for days at a time (most recently at [m:PixelAche|PixelAche] for Anthere and A Decade of Web Design for Angela). For more on these conferences, interviews and press reports, see Press (pg. 6) and International (pg. 7).

Effort has recently been put into improving the public collection of presentation materials. Anthere crafted a leaflet in French with Notafish for the TIC21 meeting in January 2005. Elian later released a collection of leaflets to be translated for the Fosdem meeting.

Jimmy Wales and Howard Rheingold [1] at Stanford University [2].By Alterego. Screenshot from a video [3].

The full collection of current material may be found in three collections, for presentations, promotion, and leaflets. Most of this information may now be found in English, German, French and Dutch. Please add to these in other languages.

Las primera donaciones de 2005 fueron iniciadas el viernes , 18 de febrero hasta el 1 de marzo del 2005.
El objetivo fue alcanzar la cifra de 75.000 USD to meet the immediate expenses in our 2005 budget. Originally, the fund drive was planned to run for three full weeks; however, we soon exceeded the original goal, and cut the fund drive short by 9 days. When all sources of donations were counted, we had surpassed the goal by 26%, raising the equivalent of 94,648.70 USD. A full breakdown of contributions by source is available; a quick overview:

76.44% (72,352.01 USD) from PayPal

21.18% (15,254.66 Euros | 20,046.15 USD) from Wikimedia Deutschland.

1.22% (1,155.00 USD) from snail mail/post

1.16% (1,095.54 USD) from MoneyBookers

Last December, the Lounsbery Foundation granted the Foundation 40,000 USD for hardware expenses in the first quarter of 2005. This grant, added to the money generated in the drive, allowed the foundation to purchase up to 75,000 USD worth of hardware.

20,000 USD were set aside for additional hardware and/or to pay for development projects. This is also the first quarter where the full cost of hosting is being charged to the foundation; 16,000 USD was allocated for this. The extra 20,000 USD over the fundraiser goal was put into a reserve fund.

The foundation now has two employees: a part-time hardware assistant and one full-time developer under contract. The 8,000 USD for the developer is being provided by official mirror contracts. The 1,500 USD for the hardware assistant has been allocated from the budget.

After many months of waiting, the Wikimedia Foundation has been officially classified as a public charity and granted 501(c)(3) (tax exempt) status by the IRS. Donations to the Foundation are now tax deductible in the United States. The Foundation is now qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers, or gifts. The effective date of the exemption is June 20, 2003 (the date on which the Foundation was created), and the status is fully retroactive. If you have donated to the Foundation in the past, those donations may be claimed as tax deductions.

One grant meeting was held on IRC in February, with about 10 people in attendance.

The most practical content of the meeting was a debate over whether and how to pursue a pending UNESCO grant. Sj made contact with the granting organization and presented a proposal for outreach to libraries, in line with the goals of the grant.

Danny opposed this idea on the grounds that Wikimedia should not be pursuing such endeavours at this time; GerardM offered to write a separate proposal based on ideas for an Ultimate Wiktionary. Danny and Gerard worked on this proposal over the following week and submitted it; however, it was turned down.

Shortly thereafter, a similar proposal by Gerard won a 5000 EUR grant from Kennisnet to allow for the initial development of Wikidata and Ultimate Wiktionary (for a full report on the grant, see International, pg. 7). That development project was later undertaken by Erik Moeller.

January and February saw a number of slowdowns and, on one occasion, a ccomplete shutdown of Wikimedia sites. These were due to a variety of reasons. Many individual servers broke; 10 machines in the main cluster were fixed in the first quarter alone; and traffic continues to rise. The colocation facility had a massive power failure in February, leading to two days of downtime and read-only availability. As of the start of Q2, almost all servers are back in action, and the cluster is looking healthy.

Developers have recently started a LiveJournal as a way to communicate about servers issues with the community. One more feed for your preferred RSS aggregator...

There were two major power outages in the first quarter. The first outage, around February 21st, was due to a [m:February_2005_server_crash double power failure]: two different power supplies to our cluster were switched off at the same time, when some of the internal switches in our colocation facility failed. Some databases were corrupted by the sudden loss of pwer; the surviving database had not been completely up-to-date with the most current server, and it took almost two days for developers to recover all data. In the meantime, the site was restored to read-only mode after a few hours.

The second outage took place on March 16th due to a human error: one of the master database's hard disks filled up, preventing slaves from being updated. At this point the data cluster had not fully recovered from the previous outage, and there was less than full redundancy among the database slaves. By the time space was made on the disk, the most up-to-date slave was already many hours behind. It took over eight hours of read-only time for the databases to be resynchronized.

In December 2004, servers donated to the Wikimedia Foundation were installed at the Telecity facility located in Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris, France. The network access is donated by French provider Lost Oasis. In January, the software setup was completed; however, various problems then had to be ironed out.

As of April 1, 2005, those machines cache content in English and French, as well as all multimedia content (images, sounds...), for users located in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switerland, and the United Kingdom (daily stats per country). The caches work as follows: if they hold the requested page in their local memory, they serve it directly; otherwise, they forward the request to the main Florida servers, and memorizes the answer while passing it to the browser of the Wikipedia user. Typically, for text content, 80% of accesses are cached (that is, they are served directly); the proportion climbs to 90-95% for image accesses. Due to the current way that the Mediawiki software works, content is cached much more efficiently for anonymous users: essentially, all text pages have to be requested from Florida for logged-in users.

The interest of such caches is twofold:

First, they relieve the load on the main Wikimedia Florida servers. We have to buy our bandwidth (network capacity) for Florida, whereas we can get (smaller) bandwidth chunks in other locations.

Second, they make browsing much quicker and responsive, at least for anonymous users. Any access to the Florida servers from Europe may take 100-150 ms round trip; this means that retrieving a complete page may take a significant fraction of a second, even if the servers respond instantaneously. The Paris servers, on the other hand, have much smaller rountrip times from the countries they serve.

The Paris caches serve as a production experiment and test bed for future cache developments, which are currently being studied. We may, for instance, change the caching software in order to reduce the load on the caches (currently, with all the countries they serve, the machines are loaded 80-95%; the machines are, however, quite outdated), and see how we may improve efficiency and cache rates (it appears that the caches do not perform as efficiently as they should by fetching data from each other).

MediaWiki 1.4 became stable on March 20th. Although the Wikimedia farm had been using 1.4 betas since December 2004, this means that most bugs have been fixed and developers are free to work full time on the next release. MediaWiki 1.5 will use an improved database schema, which should greatly enhance performance. There is also some interesting new code to improve page caching: pages served to anonymous users and to logged-in users will look the same, something which is not the case in 1.4.

As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels, Jimmy Wales appealed to the development community for support with the technical side of running Wikipedia. Analyses of these remarks were published in several places last week.

This quarter, a much awaited new statistics feature has been announced by Erik Zachte. It took a couple of weekends to get the scripts up to date for the new database format. The layout has been improved in some places, with newest statistics showing up on top, and language names in comparison tables.

EasyTimeline charts are collected for each Wikipedia language, and listed together with the script code. This may serve as a source of inspiration to help learn the syntax. This can also help find real gems on other Wikipedias that deserve to be translated. While starting a timeline from scratch is not trivial, expanding, correcting or translating an existing chart is indeed "easy."